Amazon.com once again flexed its muscles in the e-book realm, removing 4,000 books distributed by the Independent Publishing Group (IPG) from its site, after a dispute with IPG over pricing. And this time, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America has responded by changing Amazon.com links on its website to other retailers, such as Powell's or Barnes & Noble.

While Amazon has the right to decide with what company it does business, its removal of many of our authors' books from its ordering system will have an economic impact on them. Our authors depend on people buying their books and a significant percentage of them have books distributed through IPG. Therefore, SFWA is redirecting Amazon.com links from the organization's website to other booksellers because we would prefer to send traffic to stores where the books can actually be purchased.

To that end, our volunteers are in the process of redirecting book links to indiebound.org, Powell's, and Barnes and Noble.

Many authors will be hit hard by this, so we encourage you to seek out new places to find their books.

It is worth noting, that if a book is only available on Amazon, we are leaving the link in place. Our goal is to make sure that it is possible to order our members' fiction. Hurting authors to make a point about a publishing model is not a good practice, for anyone.

Expect to see more incidents like this as the battle over how much to charge for ebooks heats up — with Amazon in a unique position to push for lower prices, as the manufacturer of the Kindle as well as the biggest e-book retailer. [via Geekwire]